NEW ZEALAND CITIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21906, 18 March 1933, Page 12

NEW ZEALAND CITIES

A WRITER'S IMPRESSIONS, (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, February 3. In the February number of the Empire Review there is an article, entitled “ Impressions of New Zealand Cities,” by Mr Alfred Stirling. - It is an excellent general description, with some few sentences of comment and comparison which may be interesting to New Zealanders themselves.

“ Auckland,” says the writer, “ has undoubtedly much in common with Sydney apd San Francisco; it is a typical harbour city of the Pacific. There is considerable rivalry between Auckland and Wellington, which, having a more central position, has displaced thS older city as the capital of the Dominion, and Wellington is inclined to speak a little slightingly of the ‘ materialism ’ of Auckland. Nature has' certainly been lavish towards Auckland, endowing it with every gift of site and climate, so that it is not surprising that its growth has been very rapid. Wellington has none the less a striking, if less conventional, natural beauty, and man has not been slow in supplying many of the deficiencies.

“ Wellington has nothing of* the Australian atmosphere of Auckland, nor is it a typical New Zealand town. It is completely sui generis. It has a certain cosmopolitan air attested by the names of its streets, such as Cuba and Panama, and by its picturesque and lively Chinatown.” - Christchurch, the writer; describes as the most English city out ot England, and might easily pass for one of the larger cathedral towns. “If Wellington is unmistakably a capital, Christchurch is as definitely provincial. In many ways it recalls Oxford, with its numerous clergy and countless bicycles, its High street, and its Clarendon, and its habit of writing itself Ch. Ch. A shallow stream, the Avon, hung with willows and birches, winds through and around the town, spanned by a score of bridges and flanked in its upper -reaches with meadows and gardens gay with English flowers. In summer it is alive with canoes and other craft and calls to mind the Cherwell, especially where it flows through the parks, hard by the Gothic cloisters and lawn-set quads of Canterbury and Christ’s College. Christchurch claims to be more ‘ intellectual ’ than the cities of the north, and its cold winter nights certainly suggest the hearth and the reading lamp. The shops of Christchurch are excellent and bear witness to a community of good taste with the means to indulge it. The Canterbury Plains, stretching from Christchurch to the Southern Alps, are the richest district in the Dominion, yet the impression given is not of great individual wealth, but a remarkably oven distribution over the whole population. ‘ A democracy which has achieved its aims—and kept its manners,’ there is little that Christchurch could be shown concerning the art of ordered living. The view of Dunedin from the high range behind the town is .unforgettable, especially at dusk when the hills take on. the purple glow of the Highlands. Soft mists half veil the harbour and thousands of lights twinkle below. You will often be told by the -most ardent Soots that even Edinburgh is but Dunedin ‘ writ large,’ You will find there Princes street and Moray place, Water of Leith, Roslyn, and Portobello, and the winds sweeps in from St. Clair with a keenness that rivals the breezes from the Firth of Forth.

“ Dunedin has nearly 100,000 citizens, and is a busy, active place, a complete contrast with' Christchurch with its leisurely calm. It is well out of the earthquake zone, and its grey buildings are tall and solid, but, apart from its setting, the town itself can hardly be called beautiful. Its most picturesque buildings are the kirks, especially the First Church, which, grey and cathedrallike, with its slender spire rising from a slender tower, stands in a green close a stone’s throw from noisy Princes street.”

Australian woodcutters clearing a thicket on the banks of the Bellringer River, North Coast, discovered a lyrebird’s nest with one black and grey egg in it on the point of hatching.